Universities are starting to break down the walls that divide scientists -- literally. Over the past several years, dozens of new laboratory buildings have been constructed with large open spaces containing row upon row of laboratory benches. More are under construction around the country.
These new lab designs represent a radical shift away from the long-held tradition that scientists work best in small rooms operated as private fiefdoms. Traditional laboratory rooms hold just a few researchers, and the resources there are managed by a single faculty member.
In the new laboratories, professors no longer control their own work areas or lock others out at night. Instead, several investigators share a larger space, as well as much of the equipment and supplies within it.
“Normally, people are very concerned about their space,” says Alan R. Saltiel, director of the Life Sciences Institute at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. The institute occupies a new $100-million, 230,000-square-foot building containing open labs that can each comfortably house 32 researchers.
Now, he says, “there’s not this concept of territory anymore. People forget about it and go on to the next thing, which is doing research.”
Mr. Saltiel and other scientists predict grand results from colleges’ experiment in space management. They say the new laboratories -- many of which, like Michigan’s, are dedicated to the hot area of biological sciences -- should foster interactions among scientists. The facilities also should nurture interdisciplinary research, in an era when mixing disciplines has become the latest trend. The scientists anticipate that new discoveries will grow out of spontaneous conversations in the hall with colleagues or chatting across lab benches with scientists from neighboring research groups.
“You can’t help but interact,” says Mannie Liscum, an associate professor of biological sciences at the University of Missouri at Columbia, which opened a new life-sciences building this past summer.
Few of the megalabs have been open long enough to prove their worth, and traditional labs continue to be built. But several architects contacted by The Chronicle say that more and more of their clients at research-intensive universities are requesting large, shared lab rooms. “Scientists are asking for this all over,” says Rayford W. Law, a principal at Kallman McKinnell and Wood Architects, in Boston.
Autoclaves began to hum and microscope lights first flickered on at the Life Sciences Institute here just over a year ago. Faculty members say they are already reaping the benefits of its innovative design.
“I had more interactions with my neighbor, Anuj Kumar, in three months than I had with people in my old building in three years,” says Daniel J. Klionsky, a research professor at the institute.
The Key to Research
In September 2003 the six-story Life Sciences Institute, its limestone, granite, sandstone, and terra-cotta exterior dotted with large windows, was almost ready for its occupants.
On the fifth floor, just past the not-yet-functional elevators and a communal kitchen and lounge, the large new laboratory spaces stretched along both sides of the building for 300 feet. A lineup of benches, fitted with gray countertops and maple drawers and shelves, stood ready for two students or technicians on each side. Desks occupied the ends of the benches, next to the windows.
In the middle of all that space, six small rooms -- for culturing tissue, using radioactive materials, and other specialized work -- divided the row of benches. But no doors or walls separated the lab benches in the east quadrant from those in the west. A “ghost corridor,” running perpendicular to the benches, connected the quadrants without interruption.
The desks and lab benches provide space for nearly 130 scientists per floor. Some 64 scientists can share one megalab on each side of the building, free of doors, with 32 in each 4,400-foot quadrant. Faculty offices cluster at either end of the laboratory spaces.
Before the move, Mr. Klionsky was hidden away in an office at the back of his laboratory in the Kraus Natural Science Building. In order to meet his closest faculty neighbor there, he had to walk through his own lab and into the corridor, open a door into his neighbor’s lab, and continue on to the attached office.
“A closed door is, at some level, intimidating,” he says now. “You feel that you are invading this person’s privacy and the sanctity of their labs.” Mr. Klionsky recalled situations at the University of California at Davis, where he taught before coming to Michigan, in which some faculty members refused to give up unused space in their labs even as other scientists crowded their students and postdoctoral researchers into rooms designed for fewer people. “It was their lab,” he says. “They had the key.”
Indeed, the cooperation required to work in open-space labs creates fear among many faculty members who have never shared their work space, says Walter J. Chazin, director of the Center for Structural Biology, at Vanderbilt University. “A lot of people think it’s crazy.”
Mr. Chazin faced resistance when he designed a wing of a new building as one megalab that would house 35 researchers from five structural-biology research groups. Faculty members worried not only that they would lose control of their own space, but also that Vanderbilt would have difficulty recruiting junior faculty members, he says, because younger scientists “might feel squeezed out by the more senior people.” Scientists reasoned that before junior faculty members had time to recruit students to their new labs, they might feel pressure to give up unused benches to neighboring research groups.
Such fears cause many researchers to decline spots in the new open labs. At the University of California at San Francisco, for instance, faculty members could stay behind on the main campus or move to open labs across town on the new Mission Bay campus. Many decided to stay put, which split some departments between the two locations.
Even Mr. Klionsky, of Michigan, admits to some early doubts. “It wasn’t automatic for me,” says the professor, who had never shared laboratory space before moving into the new life-sciences institute. “You get your turf and you defend it.” He was entering the new building with an attitude that he hoped others would share, he says: “I’m willing to ebb and flow as the need arises.”
No Turf Wars
Today Michigan faculty members interviewed by The Chronicle agree that no turf wars have been fought over the new space. But the life-sciences building is still half-empty -- it can accommodate 25 faculty members but holds just 13 -- so there is more than enough space for everyone.
The transition to sharing space was surprisingly smooth and quick, says John B. Lowe, a pathologist and research professor at the institute. The only problem he saw involved two professors who wanted to put equipment in the same small room near their joint lab space. One simply found a different room. “Within a week or two,” says Dr. Lowe, “everybody said, ‘That was easy. This is great.’”
Mr. Kumar, an assistant professor at the institute who came to Michigan just over a year ago, has three students and a technician working for him, and the institute has set aside space for his laboratory to grow. “I feel like my space is quite secure,” says Mr. Kumar, who, like Mr. Klionsky, studies yeast.
He benefits from sharing space with Mr. Klionsky’s more-established lab because he didn’t have to buy expensive equipment that the existing group already owned. In fact, says Mr. Kumar, the opportunity to work in the Life Sciences Institute helped persuade him to choose Michigan’s job offer over others.
The radical changes in academic lab design have made some concessions to past practices. The Life Sciences Institute, for instance, has set some offices apart from others, affording privacy for academic introverts. Other lab buildings, like the not-yet-complete Janelia Farm facility of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, in Ashburn, Va., have created large spaces that can be easily and cheaply divided into smaller spaces with partitions.
That design feature fits with the increasing importance of flexibility and interchangeability in new laboratories. Because groups of scientists may grow and shrink or move from one space to another, the research areas are increasingly designed to be as generic as possible.
In the past, laboratory buildings were often designed with the needs of specific faculty members in mind. That showed “a certain arrogance,” says J. Ian Adamson, a principal at the Boston-based architecture firm Payette Associates. “People thought they knew what science was and what it was to be for the next decades. But people now understand that science is ever evolving, and something hot now is replaced by a new thing two years later.”
Robert H. McGhee agrees. Institute architect for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Mr. McGhee has designed labs at dozens of institutions for many of its 300 investigators. Making labs fit multiple purposes, he and others argue, is easiest to do in a large, open space.
That flexibility extends even to the placement of lab benches in some buildings, like Stanford’s James H. Clark Center. Instead of installing utilities like gas, electric, and plumbing lines inside the benches, the Clark center’s designers hung them from the ceiling. All pieces of furniture -- including formerly immovable benches -- are on lockable wheels. That means separate groups of researchers can arrange their benches as they see fit, or even choose to eliminate benches and just use desks and laboratory equipment. Some faculty members have even placed their lab benches diagonally.
Last year the empty lab space at Michigan seemed cavernous. The vacancy conjured visions of researchers becoming faceless, nameless members of a horde, all using loud equipment, playing stereos, or talking to their neighbors. If that fear were realized, some students might find it impossible to concentrate. Others might become demoralized, feeling like cogs in a huge machine.
“One has to be careful about how big they make [labs] before they become warehouses, or too noisy, or places that don’t have anyone in charge and therefore are sort of chaotic,” says Mr. McGhee. He thinks that 20 to 24 people in one space is “a reasonable upper limit.”
Today, although the Life Sciences Institute has some 30 scientists sharing lab areas, they are surprisingly quiet. The noisier machines, like autoclaves, are housed in separate rooms, and many scientists wear headphones to listen to music. (Mr. Kumar points out that stereos can be a problem even in traditional labs. When he was a graduate student at Wright State University, a nearby researcher constantly played Simon and Garfunkel. “That was really irritating,” he recalls. “Every day, ‘Homeward Bound.’”)
Some researchers do complain that noise can make it difficult to read or write at their desks. But they can find peace and quiet in the institute’s many small conference rooms, or in its third-floor reading room. The noise levels don’t bother everyone, says David Ginsburg, a geneticist and research professor, noting that a graduate student in his group studied for his preliminary exams at his desk in the lab.
Less Imposing
The lab spaces also look much less imposing now that researchers’ equipment and supplies fill the shelves and line the countertops. Since one can no longer see through the shelving to the other end of the lab, the sheer mass of lab benches no longer dominates the view. David G. Motto, a postdoctoral researcher in Dr. Ginsburg’s group, says his perspective changed after people moved in: “Now, honestly, it just seems like a lab.”
Before they moved in, some faculty members worried about maintaining shared equipment and supplies. But no such problems have materialized. Many groups have assigned people to take care of certain instruments, or required scientists to sign up to use equipment, so that responsibility for care and cleanup is clear. Faculty members say they have found it easy to agree on who pays for what. That issue has often been moot, points out Kun-Liang Guan, a biological chemist, since “most of the equipment is new, and so it hasn’t broken yet.”
Sharing space has, in fact, motivated better behavior in terms of cleaning up and maintaining equipment, asserts Dr. Ginsburg. Misuse of shared space embarrasses people, he says: “It’s sort of like you’ve got guests all the time, so you don’t leave your clothes around on the floor.”
The Benefits of Collaboration
The nation’s growing number of open-format labs parallels life scientists’ increasing interest in collaboration. Whether they are trying to make sense of the reams of data being deposited daily in genomic data banks, working out how the various parts of the cell work together, or trying to understand how plants and animals adapt to changing climate, biologists have come to realize that the problems they face are too difficult to take on alone.
Developmental biologists, structural biologists, and chemists are swapping notes and techniques, and geneticists have turned to specialists in information technology for help. In interdisciplinary-research centers around the country, scientists from many departments and schools within a university come together to share space and ideas. At Michigan, the Life Science Institute’s 13 faculty members represent 10 departments in the schools of medicine, business, and arts and sciences.
Buildings can ease or hamper the ability of scientists to meet, says Denise Scott Brown, of the architecture firm Venturi, Scott Brown & Associates, which designed the institute along with SmithGroup. “We can never make people meet,” she says. “Space can’t do that. But it can provide an opportunity.”
For scientists, incentives to collaborate are more than intellectual. Government agencies that pay for academic research have increasingly provided awards for interdisciplinary science. Although no agency explicitly tracks money for interdisciplinary projects, the National Science Foundation has compared awards given to single investigators with those given to multiple scientists. In 1982, individual investigators pulled in seven-eighths of the research dollars provided by the NSF; by 2001, that proportion had fallen to about half.
In its 2003 “Roadmap” for medical research in the 21st century, the National Institutes of Health made interdisciplinary research a backbone of the program and created grants to help facilitate it. The NIH financed $129-million of research in 2004 under the Roadmap and expects to spend $2.1-billion over the course of six years.
Last month the National Academy of Sciences published a 300-page report, “Facilitating Interdisciplinary Research.” Michigan’s institute and others like it seem to have anticipated some of the academy’s suggestions and to have dealt with some of the barriers to interdisciplinary research that it identified.
For instance, the academy panel said, one “cause of turf battles between departments” is the tradition that academic administrators “are rewarded for strengthening their own departments, not for building links to others.” The Life Sciences Institute has been careful to keep researchers affiliated with departments, which benefit financially from having their faculty members there.
The institute shares with each department the cost of faculty members’ salaries and any startup packages -- or the institute fully pays for them, depending on the scientist and the department. The institute keeps most of the overhead from the faculty member’s grants, since it provides the facilities for the research, but the department takes home 10 percent of the money. The department still gets credit for the research its scientists do at the institute.
The academy’s report also recommended that scientists have both formal and informal opportunities to communicate with potential collaborators. The Michigan institute offers multiple chances for such interaction, from chatter around coffeepots to organized monthly meetings of the seven faculty members on the fifth floor to discuss one research group’s progress.
The institute’s attempts to encourage mixing among the research groups seem only partially successful, however. A visitor saw students and postdocs chatting on several occasions, but often they all worked for the same faculty member. “We’re interacting!” one scientist announced when a reporter approached six students talking over lunch in a kitchen area. But they all worked for Dr. Ginsburg.
Alone in a Crowd
Indeed, the impression is that Michigan’s building, which was designed to foster interaction among scientists, has not created a revolutionary change in how science is done. Research is still largely a solitary endeavor. Scientists still pipette liquids, work at desks, carry reagents to their benches, grow new tissues, read journals, and analyze data -- alone.
A few new collaborations have sprung up throughout the building, however, and one has already borne fruit. Mr. Klionsky and Mr. Guan submitted for publication last month what may become the institute’s first published paper resulting from a collaboration. Meanwhile, Rowena G. Matthews, a chemist, has begun to study a mouse she engineered with the help of Dr. Ginsburg, the geneticist.
“We simply couldn’t have done it without the kinds of interactions we’ve had with David Ginsburg,” she says.
All involved agree that the collaborative work, like the concept of open-format labs, has yet to prove its worth. “You don’t know if it’s a breakthrough,” says Mr. Saltiel, the institute’s director. “We won’t know for a while.”
The idea behind the Michigan building was never to reinvent science. “Plenty of great research goes on in pretty crummy space,” says Dr. Ginsburg. Instead, the scientists wanted to bolster interdisciplinary research, to make it easier to generate big ideas and to test them. Whether scientists of the future will decide to return to their little boxes, no one can say.
“My research hasn’t fundamentally changed. What’s changed is the way I interact with people on a daily basis,” says Mr. Liscum, the Missouri biologist. “That interaction has to happen. Otherwise this building becomes just like every other academic institution. We want something more than that.”
CREATING CONDITIONS FOR COLLABORATION The Life Sciences Institute at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor shares several attributes with other new open-format research buildings:
| Large, open spaces allow dozens of scientists to work in shared laboratories. The flow of people is uninterrupted by doors or walls. |
| Small adjoining rooms house noisy equipment or specialized work. |
| Clustered faculty offices promote interaction. |
http://chronicle.com Section: Research & Publishing Volume 51, Issue 16, Page A12